Debian 4.0 -- Several weeks later, and after a 21 month development cycle, Debian GNU/Linux
4.0 was the next release to debut. Debian 4.0, code named "Etch," was also meant
to arrive in time to make it under the holiday tree but instead endured a long and
winding road to release including the creation of a Dunc-Tank.
Dunc ['"Development Under Numismatic Control"
-- which could equally be called "coin-operated coding"'] was
put in place to make sure that Debian hit their December 4 release
date. Needless to say, they didn't. Who knows when or if 4.0 would
have been released without Dunc tank but one things for sure, it did
cause a whole bunch of ruckus within the Debian community.

CentOS 5 -- Most recently, near the end of last week, CentOS (Community ENTerprise Operating System) released CentOS 5,
a release which bears an uncanny resemblance to RHEL5. Actually its
billed as being a "100% compatible " rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise
Linux and is based on the upstream release 5 including both server and
client packages.

Ubuntu 7.04 -- Which brings us to the present and the eve of the eve of the release of
Ubuntu's until-now-known "Feisty Faun." Feisty, which will be
released Thursday under the humorless moniker of Ubuntu 7.04, will
include performance improvements, improved availability
of
network services, secure remote network services, UltraSparc
improvements (Yea!), updated LAMP stack, updated cluster suites and
virtualization. More importantly on Thursday you'll get to see if we
made good on our promise made back in November to include Glassfish
(the free and open source Java EE 5 implementation) in the next Ubuntu
release.